Chapter One: Too Old To Be Running Down Alleys

“I thought you’d be eager,” Kordroun said coldly. “You were more than a good shieldmarshal, once. You were one of the best.”

Bors Gelgur nodded, took another long, sweet quaff of ice wine, and went on gazing at the cracked, soot-caked wall. “Once.”

“So you don’t care what happens to Alkenstar?”

The retired shieldmarshal looked up with obvious reluctance. He was drunk, but not nearly as gone as Kordroun had often seen him in recent days.

“Does Alkenstar care what happens to me?”

“Yes, as it happens,” Kordroun snapped, striding impatiently across the drunkard’s squalid room—it only took two steps—and then back again. “We need you.”

“I retired.”

Kordroun nodded. “To sit here,” he observed flatly, “waiting to die.”

Gelgur shrugged and took another sip from his flagon. Seemingly surprised to discover that he’d emptied it by doing so, he peered into its depths, as if to see if it held some secret compartment.

Kordroun waited, while a fresh bank of the ever-present Gunworks smoke drifted through the open window and curled around them, but although the usual muted clanging could be heard from inside the foundries, inside the room silence stretched.

Gelgur wasn’t going to rise to that goad. Time to try another.

“If the walking dead of all Geb flood through Alkenstar, there’ll be no more of that wine you’re so fond of.”

“And likely no more Bors Gelgur to drink it,” the old man growled back. “So? How will my putting on my badge again stop an army?”

Kordroun went to the window and tried to force it closed. The rusty metal frame squealed in protest.

“Leave it,” Gelgur snapped.

Kordroun kept on shoving. With a long shriek of protest, the window closed. “We mustn’t be overheard.”

Gelgur rolled his eyes. “By half the spies of Golarion listening at my window, when we’re four flights up? I think not.”

High Shieldmarshal Ansel Kordroun prowled toward the old man like a hungry wolf, head lowered between his shoulders as he snarled, “Gelgur, it won’t be your window much longer if you don’t find some coin! You owe more than you can ever repay, no one will lend you more, and you’re down to your last—” He waved at the shelf above the bed, and the forlorn little net that hung there. “—two onions and half a roundloaf. And as I can only see empty bottles under the bed, you’re probably about out of your precious ice wine, too.”

“Get out,” Gelgur said dully, looking at the nearest wall.

“How would you like three years of a shieldmarshal’s pay? All at once, in your hands?”

“Get ou—who is going to approve handing anyone that much?”

“The Ironmaster,” Kordroun breathed in Gelgur’s ear, shaking a heavy, clinking purse and setting it on the old drunkard’s shoulder, so he could feel its weight. “If you undertake this for Alkenstar. Plus a good heavy purse—this one—to cover expenses, as you work.”

He left the coins draped over Gelgur’s shoulder as he went back to the door and leaned against the wall beside it, arms crossed.

The retired shieldmarshal went on staring at nothing as the clanging and hammering of the Gunworks went on outside the closed window, but Kordroun noticed those old and hairy-backed hands—still strong, by the look of them—starting to tremble.

“I’m… my legs, the old wounds… my shoulder, blast it… Roun, I’m too old to be running down alleys and climbing walls to fight young murderers—or the ghouls of Geb, for that matter!”

“You won’t have to. You’ll be working with a young, strong, fast gunhunter. Who needs your wits and your experience—and will obey you.”

Gelgur gave Kordroun a long, expressionless look.

Kordoun knew that the old man had never liked gunhunters—most shieldmarshals didn’t—but by his own admission, had more than once found them useful.

“Let’s go see this gunhunter,” Gelgur said flatly.

Kordroun held up a quelling hand. “After I tell you what this is all about.”

The old man let out a long sigh, waved an arm, promptly winced and clutched at that shoulder, and growled, “Someone’s smuggling a lot of guns and powder out of the country and into Geb, right?”

Kordroun stared, mouth almost falling open before his eyes narrowed. “You know?”

“I’m a bumbling old drunk, Roun,” Gelgur replied testily, “not an idiot.”

He flung the empty flagon in the direction of his bed and watched it clang off the wall. “What else could it be? What else does Alkenstar have that wider Golarion wants? Out by means of mercenaries, to Nex or Geb, and it’s Geb you’ve been mentioning, so…”

Kordroun went on staring hard for a long and silent time, but Gelgur just rested his grizzled chin in his hand and stared back, uncowed. Growing a sour smile.

Eventually Kordroun sighed and shoved off from the wall to stride across the room again. “You have it right. Someone’s smuggling guns and powder out into Geb, and has been doing so for a long time. A lot of guns and powder.”

“So you come to me. Old brokenwing Gelgur, friendless and unfriendly, who’s busy drinking himself to death.”

The old man got up from his stool to stare up at Kordroun. “Don’t you trust your fellow shieldmarshals, and the Ironmaster’s best gunhunters? Or are you running out of both?”

Kordroun nodded curtly. “I ran out of trust a long while ago. And yes, we’re losing gunhunters.”

∗ ∗ ∗

A gunhunter was an investigative agent of Alkenstar—a spy for the Ironmaster, Seneschal of Security for the Grand Duchy—usually sent out into the wider world to be the eyes and ears of Alkenstar. On rare occasions they worked inside the Duchy, but shieldmarshals who learned of such deployments tended to be furious and fearful, for it could only mean one of their own was under suspicion.

Shieldmarshals were the senior gunmarshal officers responsible for policing the Duchy and internal discipline among the gunmarshals they commanded, and tended to be hard, shrewd, and capable. So gunhunters were usually all of those things—and bold, ruthless, and far-thinking to boot.

Kordroun did not have to tell Gelgur that someone highly placed and powerful in Alkenstar must be behind the smuggling. If gunhunters were being murdered and news of that wasn’t all over the Duchy already—and it wasn’t; one thing old and idle drunkards had more than enough time to do was follow the free amusement of daily street gossip in the outer yards of the Gunworks, most of it born of alley whispers in the city of Alkenstar that seemed to fly upriver faster than the swiftest message-birds—the killers were good. Very good.

The gunhunters would have been sent forth to try to find and follow the trail of stolen weaponry back to the Duchy, while Kordroun and any other shieldmarshals assigned to this did their prying in the city of Alkenstar, and from there back here to the alleys and slums of the warehouses and firing-yards surrounding the Gunworks, where maimed old foundry workers and retired shieldmarshals like Gelgur lived out their last days…

“What’ve you managed to find out?”

Shieldmaster Kordroun shrugged. “Nothing. Our investigators have all disappeared before they could report anything back.”

“I see.” Gelgur dragged the fat, clinking purse from his shoulder and hefted it. “Nice to know my life is worth this much.” His sarcasm was as open as it was heavy, but Kordroun didn’t bother to wince.

“Three years’ pay—”

Gelgur cut him off. “If I live to collect it, which sounds less than likely.”

The old man dropped the purse inside the front of his stained jerkin, heedless of the obvious bulge it made just above his belt, fetched out some well-worn boots from under the bed, and stamped them onto his feet. “So where is it all? My shiny new badge, the sword and the cloak?”

“I can get you an old blade and a forgeworker’s weathercloak, not shieldmarshal’s gear. No badge, Bors. You’ll be working… unofficially.”

“A shieldmarshal’s badge can open doors all over Alkenstar—sometimes with a bang.”

Gelgur regarded Kordroun without any expression at all, for long enough to scratch his ill-healed shoulder thoroughly, then nodded.

“So I am. The Ironmaster know you came here?”

“The Ironmaster sent me,” the shieldmarshal said shortly.

“Who else knows?”

Kordroun shrugged. “Your recruitment was discussed, but I doubt many of my fellow shieldmarshals thought the Ironmaster would agree to it. No one was standing handy to overhear her orders to me.”

“Do you think you’re being watched?”

“Not that I’ve noticed, and I’ve been looking, but…” Kordroun shrugged again.

Gelgur nodded. In crowded Alkenstar, just as here in the smoke-eddying stone labyrinth of streets around the Gunworks, with balconies and flying bridges everywhere overhead and the ever-present forge-din and noise of boots on cobbles, prying eyes could be anywhere, missed by even the wariest shieldmarshal.

And beneath every eye could be a loaded, ready gun.

Of course Kordroun was being watched.

Which meant…

“Get out. Now. I’ll be right behind you.” Gelgur slapped at his visitor, pawing the taller, younger man into turning around and moving for the door, almost bludgeoning him with a whirlwind of clutches and slaps and pushes. “Meet me on the roof of the Old Pump at moonrise. Bring the sword and the cloak and enough wind to tell me all you know. And be ready to take me to see this gunhunter of yours.”

“I—she—”

“You can tell me the Ironmaster’s secret orders then,” Gelgur snarled, shoving the shieldmarshal at the door. Let the man in good back-and-breast service armor take the first bullet. “Move!”

“But why the sudden haste—”

“I have fits that come on, and I feel penned in! Can’t breathe, look you! Must walk, must get striding along, must—”

It sounded like babbled nonsense even to the old man spewing it, but it got Kordroun out the door and into the squalid alley beyond in a stumbling hurry, allowing Gelgur time to give the shieldmarshal a good shove in the back to propel him one way, while he scrambled down a narrow, smoke-spewing side-cleft.

He heard the crash of his window shattering before he’d run seven panting strides, breathless in his fumbling urgency to clamber over old rotten barrel-staves and the long-discarded rusting skeletons of old forgework.

At the sound, he left off hurrying and plastered himself against one rough, slimy alley wall.

The blast came a moment later, smiting his ears like heavy fists.

The shriek of rending metal was like a tortured woman’s scream. That would be his stout metal door becoming a flesh-shredding cloud of whirling metal plates and shards, and starting to hurtle full-tilt down the alley he’d sent Kordroun along.

Gelgur felt himself slammed against the wall, or the trembling wall slamming him. His teeth rattled and there was bruising pain as the cobbles under his boots heaved and then sank down again, and the din set his ears to ringing, and then thankful numbness, so the screams and shouts that rose all around were Sarenrae-blessedly faint. But his hasty embrace of the stone wall had saved him from real harm—masterful mighty hero that he was.

Feeling ill—running fast and hard was never wise, with too much wine aboard—Gelgur peered vainly back behind him.

He could see only roiling smoke. Small shards of stone—and his bed and stool and pitifully few belongings, no doubt—were starting to come down now, in a spattering rain like the last sigh of a winter hailstorm.

This, here in his cleft, was only a side-waft. He hoped the shieldmarshal had found sense enough to get himself far from Gelgur’s room, and then been wise enough to fling himself flat rather than whirling to stare back.

It was doubtful, but then the man had seen sense enough to come seeking Bors Gelgur when Alkenstar needed trouble clawed out of its own innards.

Or no… the Ironmaster had been wise enough. Kordroun had come unwillingly, under orders. Her orders.

Which meant that the bomb meant to slay him and Kordroun had come from someone who’d overheard those orders. A shieldmarshal or a gunhunter or someone else of high enough rank to be skulking around the Ironmaster’s citadel beneath the city of Alkenstar, that handful of hidden rooms citizens called Irondoors or more formally the Vault of Secrets, where the gunhunters trained and dwelt and took their orders.

He was up against the authority of Alkenstar, all right.

Gelgur put a hand over his mouth and nose to keep out blast-dust, leaned back against the reassuringly steadfast stone wall, and drew in a deep breath.

It might be the last moment of leisure he got for a long time.

With his other hand, he felt in the front of his jerkin for the small, useful thing he’d filched from Kordroun just before the blast.

Finding it, he slid it by feel down past the purse, into the little slit-pouch on the inside of his belt. He wasn’t stupid enough to pull it out where it could be seen, even here amid all the drifting dust and smoke.

Thin, slightly curved, and—he ran his thumb over them, feeling them clearly—embossed with a divided shield adorned with the crossed flinthammer longrifles.

A shieldmarshal’s badge.

The authority of Alkenstar, that gave him the right to enter and search, to give orders, to arrest and detain.

Was Kordroun still alive enough to miss it?

About then, the first shot came at him out of the smoke.

Chapter Two: A Shot in the Dark

The ball cracked off the stones not far from his head, spitting stone chips in all directions. Gelgur flung himself over a heap of refuse after it, skidding chin-down onto bare cobbles and flinging his arms and legs wide, getting as low as he could—and then sliding to a stop and holding himself still.

As he fought to make his breathing shallow and quiet, a second shot whanged off something discarded and metal in the refuse not far away. Then a third sang past, sailing the length of the narrow alley to smack into distant stone at its far end.

Someone had overheard the Ironmaster’s orders, all right.

Someone who had a pistol, and knew how to fire it. A good workaday Gunworks sidearm, one of hundreds of nigh-identical long-barreled flintlock “roaring-maws,” the older and heavier war-pistols almost every elder of Alkenstar had handled, or still owned. And which could easily hit a scrambling rat the length of an alley away, given a clear shot.

Not that matters were anywhere close to “clear” here, yet. Smoke was still swirling, as dust and the smaller, lighter particles of the blast-rain sighed down. No one would be taking clear shots at anything near here. Yet.

Gelgur kept still, trying to breathe as silently as possible. His chin hurt, and one of his elbows, but pain had been an old friend for years now, thanks to several-times-broken legs and a shoulder that refused to heal around the cluster of three balls still buried in it. Those balls were the heart of a maze of crisscrossing bullet-holes that had torn through him in a few burning breaths of agony, that had left one arm and shoulder nigh-shredded…

He’d told Kordroun the truth. He was too old to be doing this.

He had some assets, of course. The badge, two small metal flasks of icewine—one a weak and sour vintage, the other the most potent fire he’d yet tasted—and a knife with a dash-skull pommel riding in its sheath in his right boot. None of which made it anywhere near prudent to stand up and challenge—or even make much noise fleeing, no matter how fast he went—someone with a service pistol, firing down an alley too narrow to miss anyone in it for long.

It wasn’t near enough to nightfall for either Gelgur or the shooter to dare wait for darkness—and the shieldmarshal patrols—to try to cloak what they did. That blast would bring someone to investigate; there were distant shouts already. Whoever was trying to kill him wouldn’t have much longer to gun him down.

This time.

A door banged open somewhere ahead, and Gelgur’s would-be slayer fired again, the ball cracking off the unseen door and causing a startled, profane shout.

Another door crashed open, toppling over a rusty metal rack in the narrow alley and causing a deafening clatter.

Gelgur used the din to scrabble across the bare patch and around behind a splayed heap of brown-rusted sheathing-plates, so he was facing back the way he’d come, and had some cover.

He peered out through the rusted brown tangle into the drifting smoke, seeking the shooter who wanted him dead.

Someone was in the narrow alley and moving toward him, he could see that much. An upright shape—a man, or a tall woman—in the eddying smoke and dust.

Then the unpredictable smoke rolled aside, just for an instant, and Gelgur found himself peering at a gun with its tamping-rod still down the barrel. Above it was a face he knew, glaring in his direction: High Shieldmarshal Ansel Kordroun. Looking as unruffled as if the blast that had hurled the still-settling dust had never happened.

Their eyes met. Kordroun snatched out the rod and aimed the long-barreled weapon right at Gelgur—and the smoke rolled back between them like a blinding gray shield.

Gelgur flung himself back and aside, not caring how much noise he made.

The gun roared.

Its ball splanged off the rusted plates and sang past Gelgur’s ear. Kordroun started tramping nearer through the refuse, and Gelgur whispered out fierce curses as silently as he knew how.

Someone fired in his direction from the far end of the alley, where Gelgur had started from. The shot cracked off the alley wall near Kordroun, causing him to crouch down hastily.

“Gelgur?” Kordroun called, his voice sounding farther away than it should be. “Are you—?”

Gelgur kept silent, lying right where he was in the stinking refuse, very much wanting a gun.

Well, no. He’d never been all that good a shot.

Make it six or so grenades. One to toss right in Kordroun’s face, and the second about three strides beyond, so that if the man survived the first blast and fled, he’d run right into the second. Yes.

That would be good, right about now. Then Bors Gelgur could forget all about foolhardy investigations, and spend the contents of his heavy new purse on icewine.

Except for the little matter of his no longer having a home, thanks to a bomb thrown by someone who was still out there and wanted him dead.

The more distant shooter was at it again, another shot ringing off something metal and causing a sudden churning din in the nearby refuse as someone—Kordroun, presumably—decided the alley was no longer healthy to inhabit, and took himself elsewhere, fast.

Not past Gelgur, though the din had ended. Which meant the man had climbed one of the alley walls or opened a door.

Hmm. Climbing wasn’t something high shieldmarshals were known for, but opening doors closed to others, now…

From a distance, starting right outside what had been Gelgur’s front—and only—door not all that long ago, came the unmistakable sounds of someone wading cautiously through the alley refuse, heading closer.

Gelgur stayed where he was, not knowing what else to do. He was still lying sprawled, feigning death or insensibility, when the someone he’d been hearing stepped cautiously out of the thinning smoke with a drawn gun in hand—a marshal’s revolver, one of the smaller, newer ones—and came over to him.

“Gelgur?”

It was Kordroun—a wild-haired Kordroun, with blast-blackening all over his face and the soot and grit of a Gunworks street coating his armor and breeches. No pristine looks, no long-barreled commoner’s weapon in hand or belt, and his armor scarred from a good bounce or two on hard cobbles. A Kordroun who’d been caught in the edges of the blast that had almost caught Gelgur.

He was wearing a worried frown as he bent down, reaching out…

Were there two Kordrouns? Did the man have a double Gelgur had never known about, or was someone impersonating him?

This was Ansel Kordroun, all right, right down to the faint reek of his sweat. If Gelgur hadn’t seen the face of the man shooting at him…

Yet if Kordroun wanted him dead, why wasn’t he emptying his revolver into Gelgur’s face right now?

Blasts and bombards, wouldn’t it have been easier to just do the shooting back in the room? No one would have cared, after all. Any investigating gunmarshal—if one even bothered—would never suspect a shieldmarshal.

Besides, there’d been the distinct sound of his window breaking, just before the blast—and Kordroun had been with him, not outside the wall with the window, in the right place to hurl a bomb.

Wouldn’t it have been easier for the high shieldmarshal to bring a bomb into Gelgur’s room, perhaps tucked into the purse, and then depart in a hurry? Or at least run and get himself well away, to let the bomb pulp one man rather than two?

“I’m alive,” Gelgur said roughly. “Was that you, shooting at me?”

Kordroun’s frown sharpened.

“If Kordroun’s an assassin, then somebody went through a lot of effort to kill a decommissioned old drunk.”

“No. I shot at whoever was trying to kill you. I don’t think I hit him, but he got a door open fast after my second shot—I don’t know how, seeing as it has no handle on our side, just a heavy plate. I don’t think he wanted to get caught between us.”

He was still reaching down a hand to haul Gelgur up. Trying not to hesitate, Gelgur took it. “You know it was a he?”

Kordroun frowned. “No, I didn’t see him well enough. I just…” He shrugged.

Gelgur nodded. Marshals of Alkenstar had to assume a lot of things, and sooner or later, doing so became a habit. “What now? Got any icewine?”

Kordroun’s frown became a scowl. “No,” he said shortly.

Fresh shouts arose at the far end of the alley. The high shieldmarshal jerked his head in their direction. “Let’s be gone from here before marshals come crowding around. I’d rather we weren’t…”

Gelgur gave him a smile as bitter as he felt. “Seen together?”

“Let’s go,” Kordroun snapped, grabbing at Gelgur’s arm.

Gelgur let himself be hastened away. Behind them rose the din of several men hurrying down the alley toward them.

Kordroun started to really hurry, and it took all Bors’s breath just to keep up.

Along a street, down another alley, through a door, along a passage and through another door, into darkness. Then up a dank stair by feel, through another door, and along one of the many enclosed flying bridges that joined building to building above the settlement’s streets. Then down again and along several darkened hallways, in a building that echoed with emptiness and the faint scuttling of rats.

“Where’re we—?” he panted, as Kordroun stopped so suddenly in front of a half-seen door that Gelgur blundered into him.

The shieldmarshal turned and muttered into Gelgur’s ear, “Gunhunter.”

The door opened into more darkness, but anyone familiar with the Gunworks could tell by the sound their boots made as they strode along the passage beyond that it was another enclosed bridge, taking them over another street into yet another building.

One that stank of recent paint, hot oil, and forgework. They descended an enclosed stair, and at every step the crashes and clangs of nearby work grew louder. Sounds that were punctuated at regular intervals with deep, ponderous impacts that were more felt than heard. The stamping mill.

They went through a door at the bottom of the stair, past two guards who snapped to attention as Kordroun stepped between them, and out into a dark alley roofed in squealing, oil-dripping, gigantic toothed cogs, where they were met by the full, familiar, nigh-deafening noise of steady forgehammer crashings, overlaid with irregular metallic clatterings as things were dropped or raked out in haste for sorting or cooling. Gelgur knew immediately where they were, just as anyone living near the Gunworks would: the “metals in” rooms.

The cobbles underfoot were slick with oil from the cogs turning endlessly overhead. Sparing them not a glance, Kordroun led Gelgur to the left, out into a wider street whose roof was a maze of pipes and enclosed bridges thrusting out of the Works walls to run at various angles into the walls of buildings across the street. That was the seldom-seen, ever-changing rear of the main factory, where assembled weapons were oiled, fitted with grips, and “finished”—a building that sprouted new steampipes and drive-chains every month.

They turned another corner, leaving some of the din behind, and on their right was an alleyway spilling out light and steam. The billowing curls held pleasant cooking odors and a whiff of scorched pans and burnt food.

The Gunworks kitchens?

As they went closer, a shot rang out from somewhere above and behind them, spinning Kordroun around and spilling him into a cursing heap at Gelgur’s feet.

Gelgur flung himself down and clawed at the high shieldmarshal, trying to drag him against the wall, but Kordroun kicked free, his revolver out as he peered up into the darkness.

When the second shot came, he fired back instantly—and nodded in grim satisfaction at the shrill, high scream that followed, a despairing wail that ended in a grisly crunching. The cogs started squealing more loudly, and blood pattered down to the cobbles.

As the cogs returned to their usual clatterings, Kordroun staggered to his feet, shaking off Gelgur’s helping hands.

“I’ll live,” he snapped. “Armor caught it. Come. Before another gunman tries his luck.”

He stepped into the alley that held the light and curling steam of the kitchens, and Gelgur followed.

The next shot out of the darkness found only empty cobbles.

Chapter Three: Up From the Kitchens

Guards were shouting now. Shouts that were getting rapidly nearer.

Kordroun listened to them, then nodded as if satisfied and strode on into the steam, passing along a line of propped-open windows it was billowing from.

Gelgur tried to peer through the clouded panes into the busy, noisy rooms below. He caught distorted glimpses of gleaming pots over flames, hurrying smocked cooks, and a forest of pans and ladles and long-forks all hanging like so much laundry from overhead racks.

The High Shieldmarshal stopped abruptly, and pointed.

Gelgur stared, then went up to Kordroun’s back and looked right along that pointing arm, to make very certain.

He was staring at a scullery-wench, a ruddy-faced young woman as tall and burly as a big lout of a man, with a hard face and big chin to match. By the swell of her ample bosom, she had to be female, but with that face and those large red hands…

She was dumping steaming cookwater out of a pot of just-boiled redflesh tubers, looking both bored and displeased at having to do so.

“Her?” Gelgur hissed.

Kordroun nodded, then rapped a stern finger across Gelgur’s lips.

Well, this was the last bent bullet and then some, and Gelgur started to say so—whereupon the high shieldmarshal caught his latest recruit by the throat, lifted Bors clear off his feet, and rushed him back out of the steam-choked alley into the street.

Where Gelgur’s furious kickings led him to set the older man down and receive the drunkard’s fury, snarled right in his face. “A wench from the Gunworks kitchens?”

Kordroun sighed. “We’ve lost a lot of gunhunters.”

Gelgur sighed. “So now it’s my turn for the grave, is it?” He spat on the cobbles in disgust and turned away, shaking his head. “A kitchen lass…”

“She’s more than that.”

“Oh, to be sure! She’s an idiot babe you’re serving up to slaughter, with her eyes still afire with the excitement of being an intrepid gunhunter who knows secrets and is important and is saving all Alkenstar! I believe I’ve found one of the cruel murderers we’re looking for—and he’s standing right here beside me! Since when did high shieldmarshals recruit children? Lumbering lumps of lasses, to boot?”

Kordroun clamped a hand down on Gelgur’s shoulder—the ill-healed one, of course—snatching all breath for words away in sudden agony.

Dragging him by that iron grip, the shieldmarshal marched his hissing-in-pain recruit a little way down the street and around another corner.

“Be still, unless you want to doom us all.” Kordroun set a brisk pace along a darkened sideway, not relaxing his grip in the slightest. “We’ll be meeting her soon, and you can hearten her with your cheerful judgments then. Until then, shut your maw!”

“Let go, or you won’t have a partner for your hapless gun-lass,” Gelgur managed to rasp out. “Unless she likes corpses!”

Kordroun freed Bors abruptly, halting in mid-stride to wait through Gelgur’s inevitable fall to his knees, followed by groaning and rolling about clutching his shoulder, trying to master his pain.

“As I was saying,” the high shieldmarshal remarked in a casual, conversational manner over the hunched and moaning old man, “she’s more than just a scullery-wench. She’s the last Morkantul.”

Gelgur looked up blearily. “The what? Blazing bombards, Roun, what other surprises are you keeping from me, you blast-assed yelp-dog? She wouldn’t happen to also be the secret bride of an Arclord of Nex, would she? Or a shapeshifted linnorm, dwelling here because she loves the reek of exploding gunpowder?”

The Morkantuls had been a foremost family of the Duchy in the long-gone days when such houses had been numerous and feuding. A Morkantul had been high minister to three grand dukes, and to this day, all Alkenstar knew one Felnadar Morkantul had been the tireless sponsor of the Great Maw of Rovagug, seeing it forged and finished despite fierce opposition from ministers wanting less metal used in just one weapon. Though still notable, the family had slowly dwindled away over time—down to this one last wench, it seemed.

“Never mind her bloodline for a moment,” Kordroun snapped. “She was all I could find who might not be… tainted.”

“In on the smuggling,” Gelgur interpreted in a despairing whisper, and shook his head again. “A child, Roun.”

Kordroun shrugged. “I… a different approach was necessary. We were using our best, our veterans—and they were failing. Our cleverest, one after another… falling in a string of traps and, ah, deft murders. All of which indicate that the slayer, or the hand directing them—presumably the head gun-smuggler—is someone highly-placed and powerful in the Duchy.”

“So you went to your most raw recruit,” Gelgur growled, rolling his eyes. “I hope I’m going to be mightily impressed when I meet her.”

Kordroun sighed and looked away.

∗ ∗ ∗

Ralice Morkantul was even less attractive in person. Wasp-tongued and sullen, she obviously believed anyone who had even a single white or gray hair was a witless dotard. After a few sharp exchanges past Kordroun’s candle-lantern, she and Gelgur faced each other with glares of mutual disgust.

“Some people make up for homeliness with a winning personality. Not Ralice.”

They were in a dusty ready-room somewhere high in the Gunworks, on a floor of deserted bunkrooms used only in times of war, when extra staff were taken on and the veterans ordered to work and sleep on the premises, in shifts. Kordroun had used seven keys on as many doors to reach it, and relocked them all behind himself, his gunhunter, and his new, eldest-in-years recruit.

Inwardly, that white-haired old man was despairing.

Ralice knew she was an orphan, and though she seemed to be good at her job—trained as an herbalist, she was a food seasoner and concoctor of “remedies” in the Gunworks kitchens—she freely admitted she was utterly bored with it.

Boredom that, as Gelgur knew well from years of police work, was on the verge of plunging into malicious, vengeful hatred of authority and those more successful and wealthy.

Right now, she was afire with her new importance as a gunhunter, and aching for all Alkenstar to know it. Word of that getting out would be her death writ, of course, though she didn’t seem to want to admit that, even to herself.

And unless she was hiding some great skill from him, she was exactly what he’d feared she was: a silly youngskirts not beautiful enough for anyone to desire or molest, nor smart enough to accomplish much of anything.

Not to mention the last living Morkantul. Which meant she’d been named the city’s latest gunhunter because someone wanted her dead so they could seize her family wealth and properties—shrunken greatly from earlier days, but still substantial. All hers, every house and gun and coin of it. Entailed until she was of age, of course, but that would mean nothing to an older hand reaching out to seize them.

So had Kordroun picked her? Or the Ironmaster? Or someone higher?

Gelgur was almost certain it had been Kordroun’s decision to look up Bors Gelgur to guard this youngling’s back; he and Roun had never liked each other much. Well, he’d damned well show up this fool of a high shieldmarshal—Kordroun as High Shieldmarshal? That alone shouted to all Golarion how far Alkenstar had fallen!—by keeping Ralice Morkantul alive.

“If it comes to be that you must follow the smugglers’ trail out into the Wastes,” Kordroun was muttering, his scowling brows bent low over the lantern’s glow, “your tale will be that Bors Gelgur, retired shieldmarshal, is owed an old debt by the Morkantuls, and has accepted as payment a medicine to cure a mysterious ailment he’s in the grip of—a medicine you, Ralice, know how to make, but only with herbs you must procure fresh, that can’t be had anywhere in the Duchy. So you’ve been granted leave from your kitchen duties by senior Gunworks cooks to go out into the world and do this—in return for procuring herb-seeds on your journey that can be grown here in Alkenstar, and making trading contacts the Duchy can use to ensure ready new supplies of particular herbs and foodstuffs.”

Gelgur rolled his eyes. “You think anyone will believe all that?”

“They will if you both set about doing it,” Kordroun said sharply.

Through the last word of that rebuke, Ralice promptly spat at Gelgur, “Were you really a shieldmarshal? Did you bribe someone to get the post?”

Gelgur ignored her. “Suppose our gunhunter furnishes us with her report,” he suggested to Kordroun in a flat, neutral voice. “Of what she’s accomplished so far, of course.”

“I’ve given my report to the high shieldmarshal,” the youngskirts snapped across the table, her glare flaring hotter. “And thus far, you’ll no doubt be pleased to know, I’ve learned very little. However, my investigations led to my being chased and shot at, more than once, and I managed to trace some of my pursuers back to one man: Aldegund Toablarr, Purser to the Parliament. High Shieldmarshal Kordroun and I have been discussing how to proceed, given his… high office.”

Bors nodded, recalling his own handful of meetings with Toablarr. A coldly vicious man who enjoyed using his importance like a weapon, and didn’t care to conceal either his own arrogance or his willingness to lash out at others. Capable he might be, but no real loss to Alkenstar if he went down.

Meaning there were plenty of other clever but malicious coldhearts where he’d come from.

Yet could Toablarr really be smuggling more than a few pieces picked up in the open markets, or stolen or privately purchased by a loyal servant or two?

After all, the offices of Ironmaster, the Lord Armorer, and High Chamberlain had all been established in opposition to each other, as watchdogs each upon the other. All three positions had been carefully filled with individuals who cordially hated each other, replaced with successors even more carefully chosen for their hatreds, to make very sure there was no collusion that would mean coins went missing, or worse abuses of power. Murder, for instance.

Yet murders there now were.

So had the unthinkable happened? Were some or all of these high officials working together?

Bors regarded Kordroun. He thought he knew his old rival well enough to read him, most of the time. Right now, for instance. Young Ralice wasn’t troubling to hide anything—or didn’t know how. Their faces told him clearly they’d thought the same question he’d just asked himself. And not yet found an answer.

Well enough. Time for him to start earning his pay.

“Toablarr’s never been much liked in Parliament, nor by any who work with him,” he offered slowly, musing aloud, “but he’s always been untouchable, thanks to his three cronies.”

Kordroun nodded. “They worked together very… shrewdly. But only Eldel’s left now. Toablarr’s advantage over his two worst rivals is gone.”

“What?”

“You’ve been… away from high Duchy gossip just a little too long, Bors. Steelshrike and Hammerlees are dead. Murdered.”

Gelgur couldn’t keep his jaw from dropping.

Orester Steelshrike had been the current Ironmaster’s lover. No wonder she’d given Kordroun permission to haul an old drunkard back into harness.

“Yes.” Kordroun was smiling grimly at the astonishment Bors knew he wasn’t managing to keep off his face. “You probably didn’t know Hammerlees was one of us, either. A gunhunter, our little spyhole into the heart of the dirtiest Duchy politics.”

Big, bluff Jarack Hammerlees—secretly a gunhunter? Gelgur was glad he was sitting down, and had a solid table to cling to. Godspittle and dragonspew, what else?

From across the table, Ralice Morkantul was regarding him with malicious amusement.

A key rattled in the lock of their room’s lone door.

Kordroun and Gelgur sprang up and raced for the corners of the room, the shieldmarshal snatching out his revolver as Gelgur palmed one of his icewine flasks, ready to hurl.

The gunhunter was a little slower, but she had a revolver out, too, by the time the door started to open.

To the clacking accompaniment of a gun being cocked outside.

Chapter Four: Blasts and Spatterings

“Don’t shoot!” a fear-filled, breathless voice squeaked from the far side of the door—which stopped moving when it was ajar about the width of Gelgur’s hand. “I’m alone, and come in peace!”

Kordroun waved frantically for Ralice to crouch down. She obeyed, but still made a large, hard-to-miss bulk behind the table.

“Drop your gun—drop all your guns—and come in!” the high shieldmarshal snapped.

“Kordroun?” the voice asked, sounding almost tearful with relief.

“Drop the gun,” Kordroun barked, “Now! Or I’ll start firing!”

They heard the click of a hammerlock being applied, then the sharp, heavy thud of a gun landing on floorboards.

The door opened a little more, and the gun—one of the smallest, newest sorts of revolvers, blued and gleaming—was kicked a little way inside their room.

Then the door slowly swung wide, propelled by the boot of a lone man who stood with his hands raised. Empty hands.

They all knew that face, though none of them had ever before seen it so pale and sweating, the eyes so large with terror.

It was Aldegund Toablarr, Purser to the Parliament of Alkenstar.

“Help me!” the purser blurted, almost leaping into the room and whirling to slam and lock the door behind him. “Kordroun, someone’s trying to kill me! I need you to hide me, and—”

His panicked rush of words died away as he saw the high shieldmarshal’s gun trained on him, and the stern, set face above it.

Ralice had her gun trained, too, but Kordroun cut through her rising hiss of anger with a coldly snapped question.

“How did you find us here, Toablarr?”

Toablarr looked genuinely startled. “Uh—ah—the doors you came through, to reach this place; unlocking any of them rings a chime in the Gunworks duty guardroom… wires, I think—”

“And you were in the guardroom why?”

“Th-the duty marshal took me there, to help me track you down. He—”

Whatever else the purser had been going to say was lost forever in the loud, wet explosion that blew him apart.

∗ ∗ ∗

Everyone’s ears rang, watery eyes making the wildly swinging lantern’s light blaze up like so many swimming golden moons.

The blast had spattered the upper half of the purser all over the room.

Left with nothing atop them, Toablarr’s legs spasmed, took two wild steps, and toppled. Their thudding landing sent a grisly wave of blood across the floor.

Ralice greeted it with helpless, racking vomiting as she backed away, slipping in gore. She passed the shattered-pumpkin ruin of Toablarr’s head without noticing it.

Gelgur saw that much through a mist of blood half-blinding him. Wiping it away with an impatient hand, he ran to the still-open door, past walls dripping wetly all around him.

Kordroun was right behind, slipping and cursing.

“He was alone, I’m thinking,” the high shieldmarshal growled.

Gelgur nodded in grim agreement, Toablarr’s blood dripping off his chin. The passage beyond was dark and deserted—and in the distance, from the floor below, he heard the distant thunder of booted feet hurrying nearer. Duty marshals, responding to the explosion.

“That was no self-killing,” he growled.

It was Kordroun’s turn to nod. “He was carrying a bomb—but didn’t know it. I’d swear to that.”

“We need to find out who he was last with!” Ralice said excitedly. “His wife will know, or his servants…”

Her voice trailed off under the weight of two withering looks.

“The purser has never wed, and may spend his evenings in many places,” Kordroun informed her coldly. “You did investigate him, did you not?”

“If I were meeting a man I wanted to trick into taking a bomb from me,” Gelgur added, while the young gunhunter was still flushing crimson and working her open mouth in a silent struggle to find a reply, “I’d not be thick-skulled enough to go to his house and try to do it in front of all his servants, as witnesses. I’d invite him to my choice of meeting-places, where I could control matters. Now I’ll grant that if you were trying the same thing, I’m not so sure you’d have simple wisdom enough to—”

“Enough,” Ralice snapped furiously, finding words at last. “Consider me schooled, long-jawed veterans, and answer me this: What now?”

She started to pace, wagging one finger as she thought aloud. “We’re getting close, or there’d be none of these shootings and killings. Toablarr was working with someone, and didn’t want me—us—to find out more.”

“Someone he had a falling-out with,” Kordroun agreed. “Eldel’s the only one of his cohorts still alive.”

“Of those we know about,” Gelgur pointed out. “It could be anyone else—even Parliamentary Minister Blaklar or Trademaster Loroan. Or both of them. They were public rivals, yes, but…” He waved his hands in a flourish of futility. “We just don’t know enough.”

“Come,” Kordroun said with sudden urgency. “I don’t want a dozen marshals and Irori knows who else seeing your faces. We’ll take the back stair down, and then the bridge into the South Safestorage, and out of the Gunworks that way. Shield your faces as we go!”

They went.

∗ ∗ ∗

“Ugh,” Ralice hissed, as they came out on a balcony and ducked their heads against the cold. The usual icy night breeze was blowing down the great river gorge; its chill would have long since driven inside others who might be out on rooftops or balconies, giving them some measure of privacy. “We’re covered with… Toablarr. We’re going to stink soon.”

“We are,” Kordroun agreed cheerfully. “Which means the sooner we get to the bottom of this, the sooner—”

Gelgur slapped the high shieldmarshal’s forearm sharply for silence, flourished his other hand, still dripping, in their faces, then used it to point down into the night.

Keeping low, Kordroun and his newest gunhunter ducked around tables and benches and sped to the balcony rail, to peer down.

Only to straighten, long breaths later—time Gelgur spent vainly peering all around to try to espy anyone out on a balcony or at a window, watching them—and trade grim looks.

“Trademaster Daerold Loroan,” Kordroun said in a hard voice. “Who should have no business inside the Gunworks at this time of night—and even less success at getting past the guards to get inside.”

“Whereas they didn’t even slow him as he strode right in, yes?” Gelgur asked, looking at their faces. That gave him his answer even before their glum nods.

“High Shieldmarshal,” he said then, “I know it’s not my place here to give orders, but hear me… why don’t the two of us wait here while you go back down through the Gunworks and see where Loroan goes, then return to us? I’m wondering if he’s dropped by to see if he—or someone he’s working with—managed to silence the purser. Not that he’ll admit as much, but if it seems to you that he is, it justifies us in considering him someone to follow, and lean on.”

Kordroun stared at him, then gave Ralice Morkantul a long look.

“I’ll do that,” he said flatly. “While I’m about it, why don’t the two of you ponder what little we know of who might be part of this, and how we might find out more? Oh, and have a try at working together, the two of you, without, ah, open hostility.”

He left those biting words hanging in the air and vanished back through the door, leaving Gelgur and Ralice alone together for the first time.

They glared at each other long and silently, as the rising night wind blew down the great canyon of the Ustradi River, rushing endlessly past them with chilly claws in its haste to howl on into the rest of the Mana Wastes.

“Well,” Bors Gelgur said at last, “we may as well see—”

His voice sharpened, rose and became louder and firmer, to continue in nigh-perfect mimicry of the high shieldmarshal. “—if the two of us can have a try at working together without, ah, open hostility.”

Ralice’s mouth fell open, her face twisted as if she was afflicted with sudden pain, and then she burst out laughing, great hearty roars of laughter that her large hands, hastily clapped over her mouth, did little to stifle.

After a moment, Gelgur executed a sardonic bow, which turned her laughter into helpless snorts.

Grinning at Ralice, Gelgur rose and started to pace the balcony, thrusting aside all thoughts of her, Kordroun, and the man whose lifeblood he was still drenched with, and thought instead about the living. The suspect living.

“You’d think that someday I’d learn. You really would.”

Haun Eldel, Toablarr’s sole surviving crony, was clever, but no fighter. Probably not much of a swindler, either. Haughty and prissy about details, rights, and being in the right, he was more the sort of man who would work within the rules, changing laws rather than bending or breaking them. He wouldn’t be hiring killers.

Unless someone else they didn’t know about—which of course meant most of Alkenstar—was behind the smuggling, that meant Toablarr and his two longtime foes: Prostor Blaklar and Daerold Loroan. Either of those two would hire or coerce anyone and anything to get their own way. They went after power and coin like starving dogs, both of them… and behold, here was Loroan, turning up suddenly where he had no proper business being.

Yet did it end with Loroan? Somehow, he seemed more follower than leader to Gelgur, though any trademaster could work a swindle well enough. Was he working with Blaklar? Or someone else? Or should that be and someone else?

Bah! They had almost nothing to go on, short of catching Loroan in some quiet room without guards and breaking fingers and toes until he talked. That was how many a marshal had done things in the old days… back before every second man in Alkenstar had taken to strutting around with bodyguards, armored in friendships and “special understandings” with officials and those in Parliament.

These days, there was only one person who could break fingers and toes legally: the Ironmaster.

Gelgur’s onetime superior and sometime lover.

Vryle Summairtar, the first woman to ever hold the post of Seneschal of Security for the Grand Duchy. Head of the gunhunters, faceless eyes, and special agents who stood behind the gunmarshals. Sometimes they stood there because a gunmarshal needed to be fed steel from behind.

The one person who could investigate anyone, kill anyone in the name of Alkenstar, and had to anticipate all perils to the Duchy, keeping track of all known ones, and constantly taking stock of who was up to what, why, and with whom. The guardian of Alkenstar.

The best Ironmaster Alkenstar had ever known, they rightly judged her, even when they said so with fear and loathing. A cold woman who let you learn from her only what she wanted you to. She’d changed from the calm, superb manipulator and sharp-witted diplomat Bors remembered, gone colder. These days she’d probably break any number of fingers, toes, necks, and entire households without the slightest hesitation, to find and bring down the murderers of her lover Orester Steelshrike.

“Marshal Gelgur,” the large lass beside him dared to say then, with a newfound note of civility, “we are supposed to be discussing this matter of smuggling and murder. You’re the veteran here on this balcony; have you any suggestions as to how we should best proceed?”

“Yes,” Bors Gelgur said firmly, giving his grin sudden fangs of malice. “We’re going to talk to the Ironmaster.”

Ralice swallowed. “And how,” she asked softly, “are we going to manage that?”

“Oh, she’ll see me,” Gelgur replied, watching the door Kordroun had disappeared through. “Now, will you humor me in something, gunhunter?”

Her stare held suspicion. “What?”

“Get down flat on the floor. To give anyone a much harder shot at you. Right now. Try to make it look as if you’re sagging down, wounded or swooning.”

She gave him a defiant look, then slowly obeyed.

“And you?” she snapped, once she was lying flat. “Are you somehow invincible?”

“I prefer the word ‘expendable,’” Bors replied, his eyes on the door and his hands on a table.

When he saw the door swing open and got a glimpse of the high shieldmarshal, Gelgur went down fast, tipping the table up like a shield.

As Kordroun shouted and grabbed at his gun, two shots caromed off the tilted tabletop and whined away to crack off stonework higher up on the Gunworks walls.

“Who—?”

Muzzle-fire blossomed in half a dozen places in the surrounding night, and an enthusiastic volley spat and cracked all around the balcony.

“We can be dead,” Gelgur called to Ralice, “or we can be inside! Move!”

Ralice moved.

Then the night really came alive with gunfire.

Chapter Five: Death, Mystery, and an Ironmaster

“Rather a lot of people seem to want us dead,” Gelgur growled, as they plunged down yet another dark Gunworks stairway, the cracks and whines of gunfire finally fading behind them.

“We’re outgunned, all right,” Kordroun grunted, short of breath from hastening down flight after flight of stairs. “We’ll have to go through the cellars—the slower way—if gunfire’s going to welcome us at every door and balcony.”

“The cellars,” Gelgur echoed thoughtfully, as they rushed through another door in a rattle of the high shieldmarshal’s keys, into utter darkness. Kordroun flung out his arms to stop his two companions, who heard him, as he panted, feeling around high up to their left.

“Why not,” Gelgur suggested slowly, “abandon trying to get to the streets for now? Go down deep, instead, and take the Long Tunnels?”

A hand-lantern flared, and in its light Kordroun stared at Bors. “To talk to the Ironmaster,” he said flatly, his face going grim.

Gelgur nodded. After a long moment, the high shieldmarshal nodded too.

Then they both turned to face Ralice.

Who was pale, and busily swallowing hard. “The Ironmaster,” she said at last. “Well, why not? Days I spent, asking and watching, pondering and prying—and ever since the three of us have been together, it’s been all running and being shot at and more running.”

Gelgur gave her a mirthless grin. “We’re gunmarshals, lass, not gunhunters. We shoot and confront more than we watch and think.”

Ralice tried to smile, and failed. “You said it,” she agreed darkly.

“Come,” Kordroun commanded, aiming his lantern down a long, low-ceilinged passage. Handing them another lit lantern each, he beckoned them to follow. “It’s a good long plod to Ironmaster’s local chambers.”

Two descending stairs and a lot of walking later, they stopped at a metal wall-box.

“Privy,” the high shieldmarshal said, pointing, as he busied himself at the box, keys jingling.

Ralice frowned. “I don’t—”

“Privy,” Kordroun repeated sternly, giving her a glare.

Gelgur stepped between them, advancing on the gunhunter until she was forced to give way. As he backed her a good six steps, he murmured, “Whether you need a warmseat or not—and wise gunhunters never miss a chance—Kordroun needs you where you can’t watch what he does at that box. He needs to extract a key to get us through a door ahead.”

Ralice nodded a little wearily, and obediently went through the door Kordroun had indicated.

“Are we ever going to get to the bottom of this?” she asked, when she reappeared.

Stepping past her to take his turn, Gelgur shrugged. “I don’t think we’ll have to, if we plod along slowly enough. Those involved are killing each other with such enthusiasm and rapidity that they’ll soon be down to a few wounded survivors.”

“That’s when we’ll move in,” the high shieldmarshal said dryly. “This way.”

He unlocked a counterweighted metal-bound door with double frame-latches. The short passage beyond ended in a metal door so wide and heavy that it took all three of them to budge it—after he’d unlocked it, using two keys in unison.

It opened to reveal lanternlight, bobbing in the distance. Kordroun shuttered his lamp and hissed at Gelgur and Ralice to do the same, then hustled them a few steps toward the lanterns and down a side-passage. Unlocking a door in haste, he ushered them through it, then turned to hold it just ajar in the darkness, murmuring, “Ground your lanterns and keep hold of them. Be very quiet.”

They waited for what seemed a long time before the lanterns drew near, amid the sounds of many booted feet and low mutters of conversation.

Then light swelled and a dozen-some men strode past, looking neither right nor left. Six lanterns, everyone in uniform—heavily-armed Parliamentary guards—except the richly-garbed, bearded man who strode in their midst. He never looked in their direction, but the three watchers all knew him: Drael Kammantur, High Chamberlain to the Grand Duchess of Alkenstar.

One guard turned to look back as the great door swung closed behind the party, but Kordroun had gently pushed their own door almost closed by then. He remained unmoving for seven breaths that weren’t as slow as they should have been before cautiously easing it open again—onto utter darkness.

Unhooding his lantern, he rose and muttered, “Come on.”

“The High Chamberlain, here in the cellars of the Gunworks? What’s he doing here?” Ralice hissed, as she unhooded hers.

“Coming back from doing what we’re trying to do, most likely,” Gelgur told her grimly.

She looked from him to Kordroun.

And saw on two tight-lipped faces the same war between fury and despair.

∗ ∗ ∗

Kordroun opened another door—and stopped dead.

“The Ironmaster is as beautiful as she is deadly.”

There was no place to hide this time, not from all the lanterns in the room ahead, and the armed bodyguards holding them. No uniforms beyond identical dark leather jacks—and the person in their midst was the Ironmaster of Alkenstar.

She was standing over a body sprawled on the floor, that trailed fresh ribbons of blood across the smooth-worn stone underfoot.

Many guns flashed as they were drawn, as Kordroun raised his lantern so its light fell on his face, and said briskly, “High Shieldmarshal Kordroun, with two sworn agents. Ironmaster, we were coming to confer with you.”

The cold-eyed, beautiful woman who wore half a dozen holstered revolvers on cross-belts down the front of her black bodice gave him the faintest of smiles, ignoring Gelgur and Ralice. “Kordroun, I may have more work for you.”

She waved at the body. Kordroun advanced to look at it, pretending not to notice all the guns now trained on him.

It was Parliamentary Minister Prostor Blaklar. By the looks of him, he’d been riddled with bullets. Very recently. His face was a mask of blood, bullet holes, and frozen staring horror, his hands raised in claws to try to fend off death. Vainly.

“I fear any confidential discussion you may have hoped to have must wait,” the Ironmaster added. “Show me your weapons. Slowly, of course.”

Wordlessly Kordroun set down his lantern and drew out his guns, holding them between thumb and forefingers, and keeping them pointed at the floor. Watching him, Ralice followed suit. Gelgurs spread empty hands.

That earned him a prompt, ungentle search from five of Vryle Summairtar’s bodyguards, as more of their fellows strode to take and present the proffered guns to the Ironmaster.

Who waved them back to their owners.

“Obviously the wrong sorts of weapons to have slain the Minister, here,” she said coolly. “Leave this place, and return whence you came. I’ll send for you when I’ve time for discussions.”

“Vryle,” Bors Gelgur asked then, keeping his voice as cool as hers, “can you tell us why Daerold Loroan might be entering the Gunworks at this time of night?”

The Ironmaster crooked an eyebrow, allowing mild surprise to appear on her serene face. “Trademaster Loroan? That’s very curious. Did you see him enter the Gunworks?”

“We did, Ironmaster,” Kordroun said stolidly. “It was the Trademaster, without a doubt. We all saw him.”

“Ah,” she replied lightly, sounding almost bored. “I did not.”

And with that, the Seneschal of Security for the Grand Duchy of Alkenstar turned away, black-hued armor gleaming momentarily—almost mockingly—from one shapely shoulder.

“I trust you’ll get to the bottom of this smuggling problem soon,” she added over her shoulder. “And that when you do, you’ll report promptly to me. And only to me.”

Without waiting for a reply she departed through a far door, her agents clustering around her with guns still drawn, six of them watchfully facing the high shieldmarshal and his two companions as they backed away.

The door closed, leaving them alone with Blaklar’s body.

Ralice looked down at it, then back up at the door the Ironmaster had vanished through. “What—?”

That was as far as she got before Kordroun clapped a hand across her mouth and Gelgur plucked at her arm to start leading her back the way they’d come.

“Hurry,” was all the high shieldmarshal said, once they’d closed the door on the dead minister and started back along the passage.

Three doors and two rooms later, he asked, “This one?”

Gelgur shook his head. “The next one on was better. We can strike from both sides.”

Ralice gave them both a frown, but held silent.

Then they came to the cellar room where Gelgur pointed to an alcove and then stepped into another across from it, dragging Ralice with him.

“Keep very quiet,” he whispered in her ear, closing a painfully tight hand on her shoulder to reinforce his order.

“Is this because of the Ironmaster?” she dared to whisper back.

“She was as purringly calm as always,” Gelgur muttered in reply, not seeing—or pretending not to see—Ralice’s shiver. He drew forth one of the icewine flasks, then his knife, and held them ready. Then he and Kordroun pinched out all the lanterns.

Darkness fell like an abyss around them.

To Ralice, her own breathing seemed like a loud, panting storm, but she couldn’t hear her two companions at all.

Unmeasured time passed.

Something dripped once, far off, throwing out the faintest of emphatic echoes.

Then she heard something closer. A moment of grating. The door at the far end of the room.

Another soft, brief sound—movement, but just what, Ralice couldn’t identify—and then there was a sudden flurry in the darkness, a scuffle and a grunt and three heavy thuds, Gelgur vanishing from beside her.

Then silence again, that was ended by the skritch of a flint striker.

Kordroun’s lantern flared, and she saw a man sprawled on the floor, face down and senseless, between Kordroun and Gelgur, who were both kneeling.

“Bring the lanterns,” the old gunmarshal hissed at her.

Ralice obeyed, peering. She was sure she’d never seen the man before.

“Dead?” she asked.

“Not yet,” Gelgur said grimly. “Come.” He handed her back her lantern, lit again, and they hurried on, back through the Gunworks cellars.

When they reached the wall-box again, Kordroun halted them. “Well?”

“She’s in on it,” Gelgur replied. “That was Pelkur. One of her personal agents; a Bloodsworn.”

The high shieldmarshal stared back, pale-faced. “Yes, but is she with Loroan? Or against him?”

“What I don’t understand,” Ralice asked, trying not to sound as small and frightened as she felt, “is if the Ironmaster is mixed up in this, why’d she gather us together to investigate? Why not forbid us—and every last gunmarshal—to pry here or ask there?”

Gelgur gave her a tired smile. “She wants scapegoats. I suspect all Alkenstar is going to learn that we three dastards are responsible for something dark. Soon.”

Kordroun nodded, let out a gusty sigh, and growled, “This way. We hurry again, of course.”

“Of course,” Gelgur agreed sardonically.

They hurried.

∗ ∗ ∗

“These… shouldn’t be here,” Kordroun said grimly, crouching to avoid scraping his back on the low, arched stone ceiling of the tunnel. Seven sturdy and all-too-familiar gun crates, clearly branded with the Gunworks mark, were ranged on trundle-sledges down the greased center of the tunnel, hooked together with cables and ready to be dragged out. “Smuggling work, I think.”

Ralice gave him a dubious look. “Why would they leave anything here, where someone is bound to find it?”

Gelgur looked back the way they’d come. “Trap or warning—or they just don’t care who sees, because they’re all in on it. Shouldn’t we just get gone, and leave the back-patting and jaw-scratching for later? There are marshals everywhere—and I need a drink!”

Kordroun’s presence had got them past five challenges so far, but if the Ironmaster was caught up in this somehow, a high shieldmarshal’s presence wouldn’t grant free passage forever.

Ralice gave Gelgur one of her glares. “Just a moment. Or two. Surely your thirst can last that much longer.”

“They could be trapped,” he muttered.

She sighed. “So they could. However, I’m a gunhunter. I investigate things. Dangerous or not.” And she undid the latches of the nearest lid.

They all hunkered down as she slowly and gingerly, with the barrel of her revolver and listening for the clicks of springs or triggers, lifted the lid.

Nothing happened.

After a moment or two more of tense silence, Ralice rose cautiously until she could peer in.

Her face changed, and she sank down again.

“Either of you care to identify who it is?” she asked tonelessly, swallowing. “The… the head’s got turned around.”

Gelgur stood. The corpse in the gun-case had been dismembered—somewhere else, because the case wasn’t full of blood, and long enough ago that the gore had dried—and its severed head was lying sideways-up. “Eldel,” he said flatly, after one look.

“Anything underneath him?” Kordroun asked.

Gelgur looked again. “No.”

The high shieldmarshal nodded and undid the latches of the next case. When he levered the lid up—using the butt of his revolver, and raising it on the side facing away from him—a faint ticking began.

Hurriedly but gently he lowered it again and sprinted after Gelgur and Ralice, who had hastily scrambled back out of the tunnel, back into the Gunworks cellar they’d entered it from.

“This way,” Kordroun said grimly, rushing across it. “We’ll take the other way out. Up a level, then three cellars that way—they’re all linked—and out down by Oldcogs.”

Nodding, Gelgur and Ralice ran with him.

∗ ∗ ∗

“They must’ve grown too bold and successful to care overmuch if they’re discovered,” Kordroun muttered, as they panted in near-darkness in front of a closed door, trying to get their breath back after a seeming eternity of running. “Where we found Eldel—that’s a tunnel duty marshals check often. If I were a smuggler, I’d steer clear of it, and use this way we’re taking now. No patrol would find me or what I was smuggling down here.”

“Eldel was meant to be found,” Gelgur reminded him. “That was a trap.”

Kordroun nodded. “Yes, but if a blast damages that tunnel, shipments up to Cloudreaver will have to use this way, unless they’re planning to put them on mules and take them in the open! It makes no sense to—”

Finding the right key on his ring, he unlocked the door, swung it open to reveal utter darkness, and reached confidently into the unknown.

“There’s a catch, just here, to unlatch the portcullis and give us light, too, and—ah! There!”

There was a klack. Triumphantly, the high shieldmarshal stepped back.

And kept on backing, dancing involuntarily, as a harsh, clattering hail of gunfire spat out of the darkness into his face.

Chapter Six: No Safe Haven

The point-blank stream of bullets took the front of the High Shieldmarshal’s head off as it drove him back, a loose-limbed, dancing dead puppet, until Gelgur plucked him out of the line of fire.

And stared over the limp, heavy body at Ralice, who was biting one knuckle hard to keep from screaming.

There was another, lower klack as the last firing triggered the clockwork that started the next battery of gun-barrels, and the gunfire started to pan sideways.

Gelgur flung himself over on his back with Kordroun’s body on top of him, but before they’d bounced to a halt, the next battery had kicked in and the hail of balls were tracking back in the other direction. Ralice flung herself away, kissing the floor in her haste.

Then the firing ended, so abruptly that its echoes rang in their ears. They could smell scorched gunpowder, but see nothing beyond the dark doorway.

The dim light they were working in came from far behind them; a fixed gas-jet that was high up, out of reach.

It shed just enough radiance for Gelgur to make out the fear on Ralice’s face, and that she was silently mouthing, “What now?”

He pointed at her and back the way they’d come, then slid free of Kordroun and pantomimed crawling.

When she nodded and obeyed, he tore a strip off the tail of Kordroun’s jerkin, and crawled after her.

Twice he held up a hand to halt and listen, but there came no sounds from the doorway or the cellars they’d come through.

Gelgur wanted Ralice to climb on his shoulders and light the jerkin-scrap in the gas jet, but she gave him a disgusted look and ordered, “You climb on mine, old man.”

He shrugged and obeyed, coming down with a flame that would light their way for not all that long, by the looks of it.

They split as far apart as the passage would allow, and went back to the door. Gelgur tugged off one of Kordroun’s boots, dropped the flaming scrap into it, and tossed it through the doorway.

A portable frame had been set up inside the door, and on it were mounted half a dozen trap guns, clockwork rows and clusters of gun-barrels connected to tripwires; the sort of weapons that guarded the most important Gunworks vaults.

The tripwires were running everywhere. One battery pointed limply at the ground, and was spewing faint curls of smoke—obviously the one that had killed the High Shieldmarshal. Most of the rest were still loaded.

Gelgur picked up the heavy, faceless mess that was Kordroun. Hefting the larger man up in front of him as a shield, he staggered forward, right through the doorway.

Soon enough a second battery started up, and he flung himself at the floor, not caring where Kordroun’s body fell, reaching up with his knife to try to jam the clockwork or force the barrels upward.

He managed the latter, murdering the ceiling loudly as he fought to sever the triggers leading to the last two batteries.

After some furious sawing of wires, succeeded.

His improvised lamp had gone out, and he went on working by feel, wresting barrels from mounts and shaking out balls and wadding, scooping some of them into his pockets.

Then he kicked the frame over and flung himself back out of the doorway, in case the frame itself was trapped.

Nothing happened.

Ralice was peering at him suspiciously. “We’ll need another light; more cloth for the gas-jet. Get him back out of there—and I’ll be having his gun.”

Gelgur obeyed her wordlessly, handing her Kordroun’s revolver and powder-pouch before looking for anything else useful.

The sword, of course, and the marshal’s cloak—Ralice shuddered at its gory state, but Gelgur wadded it up for carrying—then Kordroun’s coin-purse, a nasty little boot-knife and a matching saw, and a second, smaller gun—a single-shot flintlock.

“Here,” he said to Ralice, holding it out. “Lighter. Easier for you than the revolver.”

Her look of dismissal was withering.

She was still giving it to him, with enthusiasm, when they heard the first faint marshals’ shouts, from the cellars they’d come through.

Wordlessly they rose and rushed through the dark doorway, past the trap-gun frame and on.

∗ ∗ ∗

It seemed they’d been fleeing forever, rushing through near-darkness, up stairs and through doors and across darkened rooms. The heart of the Gunworks never slept, but its extensive storage warrens were another matter.

They were stumbling-tired now, and the shouts and bobbing lanterns were getting closer.

As they plunged into a new passage, Gelgur changed direction again, and Ralice hissed, “Where are you going?”

“Trust me,” he breathed, plucking at her shoulder and whirling her through a doorway right beside the one they’d just emerged from. ” I know these ways well from years of patrols. I’m doubling back into the Works, to try to throw them off. They think we’re trying to get out, and are heading for the routes we’ll have to take, yes?”

“Yes,” Ralice hissed wearily. “I just hope you know your way bet—”

Gelgur’s hand clapped across her mouth, hard and heavy.

Enraged, she opened wide to bite—and froze.

“The two we’re looking for,” said a deep, drawling voice that couldn’t have been much more than six paces away, on the far side of a wall of stacked crates, “are Bors Gelgur, an old drunk and retired shieldmarshal who may still have his uniform, and a kitchen wench by the name of Ralice Morkantul, who looks more like a big, burly lad. Gelgur knows the Works well, and is probably trying to get out the wagon-port nearest the Oldcogs and Tankard tavern. I’ve men waiting there already, but if we can catch the two of them between us and those doorguards, we can prevent them doubling back, and save having to hunt them the length of the Gunworks. So through here, and all eyes alert!”

A door creaked, and booted feet shuffled. Gelgur and Ralice waited, immobile and silent, for what seemed a very long time before Bors took his hand away.

“Sorry,” he whispered gruffly. “You recognize the voice?”

Ralice shook her head.

“Trademaster Daerold Loroan.”

Ralice frowned. “He’s not a marshal, and never has been.”

“Yet the marshals are obeying him,” Gelgur said grimly. “This runs as deep as we feared. Come.”

Without a word of protest, Ralice followed him into deeper darkness.

∗ ∗ ∗

“Where are we now?”

“Where they keep acid to etch inscriptions in gun barrels. The damage the spills do are why this is deeper than the storage cellars.”

Ralice waved at the many large, round lids set into the floor. “Is that what these…?”

Gelgur nodded, and pointed. “That mark means acid—larger is stronger—and that one is acid-quench, to turn acid into harmless but reeking water. Avoid them all. We have to get—”

He waved at a far, dark corner of the room.

Out of which promptly stepped a man. Their guns came up—and wavered.

The man gave them a tight, pain-filled smile as he came toward them, hands empty. High Shieldmarshal Ansel Kordroun.

Battered but whole again, as if they’d never seen him killed in front of their eyes, his face blown off. So unless all they’d ever been told was wrong, and magic did work in Alkenstar, this must be a shapeshifter.

Unless the Kordroun who’d brought them together and led them through the Gunworks had been an imposter.

“Gelgur,” Ralice said quietly, her gun—the revolver that had been Kordroun’s—coming up again, “this can’t be Kordroun.”

Gelgur stared into eyes that were Kordroun’s, yet couldn’t be, and remembered seeing Kordroun firing at him in the alley and then another Kordroun joining him just after that. He tried to remember what he’d heard about shapeshifters—creatures called doppelgangers, yes. One had once been unmasked in the Duchy, long before his time…

Kordroun was striding steadily nearer. Dropping the little gun he’d scavenged from Kordroun’s body into a pocket, Gelgur went to meet him, stepping into Ralice’s line of fire.

“You can tell he’s a doppelganger because he’s slightly uglier than Kordroun himself.”

“Ansel, old friend,” he said firmly, putting a smile on his face as he slid his other hand into his other, already bulging pocket. They’d never been friends, old or otherwise.

The high shieldmarshal’s smile widened, and he nodded.

“Oh, it’s really him, all right,” Gelgur said over his shoulder, to Ralice.

“What?” she exclaimed. “Gelgur, are you mad?”

“No,” he replied calmly. “Not mad. Just close enough.”

And he was. To fling a handful of balls from the clockwork trap-gun batteries into the shapeshifter’s face, and a second handful under its feet.

It fell hard, and Gelgur game down on top of it, knife out and slicing hard.

Across the throat, and back again, deeper, blood that was the wrong hue spurting, sawing hard, beheading the thing.

Kordroun’s mouth yawned in pain, stretching impossibly wide, as the head rolled away. It was going pale, the hair melting back into the whitening flesh. The rest of the body convulsed under Gelgur, limbs going long and thin and white.

Ralice fired twice into the rolling head, her face twisted in disgust. Gelgur calmly slid a vat lid aside with one foot, and kicked the shapeshifter’s body into the acid. When Ralice lowered her gun, he added its head, too.

Sliding the lid back into place, he took the gunhunter by the arm—she was as pale as the doppelganger, her eyes wild—and led her away.

∗ ∗ ∗

The badge Bors had stolen from the real Ansel Kordroun got them past the gate guards, out through the wall and into the wildlands.

It was a cold, windy night, brightly moonlit when dark and ragged clouds weren’t in the way, and Ralice peered this way and that, eyes still wide.

Gelgur led her around a hill, out of sight of the guards. “What ails you?”

Ralice gave him an angry glance. “I’ve never set foot outside the Gunworks before. Where are you taking us?”

“Out into the Mana Wastes,” Geglur told her. “It’s that or be killed, with Loroan hunting us, and Irori alone knows who all else in it with him. Blasts and bombards, the Ironmaster herself could be in this!”

“Kordroun briefed me,” Ralice said slowly, something strange rising into her gaze. “He told me you and the Ironmaster were once…”

“Lovers, yes,” Gelgur growled. “I didn’t always look this bad, lass.”

“Ralice.”

“Sorry, lass: Ralice. That was a long time ago. So I hear I’m owed an old debt by the Morkantuls, and have accepted as payment a medicine to cure a mysterious ailment that has hold of me—a medicine you, la—Ralice, can make me, if you can get certain herbs out in the Wastes. Which is why you’ve been granted leave from your kitchen duties to depart the Gunworks, and Alkenstar altogether.”

Ralice gave him a wry grin. “I believe I know that tale.” Her grin faded. “So I walk right out into where monsters roam and magic rages.”

“Yes,” Gelgur said simply. “I believe it’s called ‘adventure.’ As opposed to staying here, which would be called ‘a swift and messy death.’”

Ralice nodded, slowly, and extended a reluctant hand. “Then let us have a promises. Hear me: I will not be your bedmate.”

“And I’ll not do the cooking, until you teach me how not to poison us both.”

The grin came back. “Done.”

They shook hands, and walked on, into the night.

Gelgur knew better than to walk the Wastes without looking back often—but neither he nor Ralice ever caught sight of the lone figure skulking after them.

Which was probably a good thing. It would have been tiresome to have to kill Ansel Kordroun twice in one night.